


Weapons of Choice

by Zelos



Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, F/M, Gen, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-05-19
Updated: 2014-05-19
Packaged: 2018-01-25 19:28:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,555
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1659800
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zelos/pseuds/Zelos
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Tony wasn’t building weapons, but he was still <i>making</i> them. He was making weapons out of the people around him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Weapons of Choice

**Author's Note:**

> Written for a [prompt](http://avengerkink.livejournal.com/16524.html?thread=36345228#t36345228%20) at avengerkink:
>
>> After seeing the alternate ending to Iron Man 2 on YouTube the other day, I got to thinking about the way the Iron Man villains have all met their ends -- especially in the first and third movies. Tony has never been the one to "pull the trigger" on the Big Bad in any of his movies.  
> Two out of three times, it's been Pepper. She killed Obidiah. She killed Killian.
>> 
>> Let's see Tony realize this and start worrying that, ever since he came back from Afghanistan and stopped Stark Industries' weapons production, he's still been making weapons -- out of the people closest to him. And angst.
>> 
>> Bonus points for Pepper's reaction, or the reaction of others close to Tony.

He wasn’t the only one who couldn’t sleep nowadays. It hasn’t escaped him that whatever the havoc he’d wrecked trying to do good, trying to make up for his sins, tried to become a hero donned in red and gold, he’d never really seen it through all the way to the end. To tally the dead, to deliver the final blow.

Pepper was the one who’d pulled the trigger.

Tony has killed, sure. Lots of people, in fact. The people that’d died from his (not Howard’s) Stark tech alone was in the thousands, to say nothing of the men and women he’d incinerated with Iron Man’s repulsor blasts. But they were always at a distance. Numbers on a page. JARVIS, and the HUD, ticking off the lives until there were none, “no survivors, sir.” He had never even had to see a body.

Pepper had hit the switch on Obie, and took care of the alibi afterwards. Pepper had destroyed Killian with her own hands. And in the middle of the night, when she woke up screaming and _screaming_ and slapping her hands like they were on fire, she wasn’t seeing him when he shook her awake. She was seeing Killian, at the hole she’d ripped through him with her own bare hands.

Tony has sworn to not build weapons again. But who was he kidding? Iron Man was a weapon, the best weapon there was. Only at least for him, Tony could control exactly who the weapon was pointing at, why they deserved to die.

But Pepper? JARVIS? All they were guilty of was being his accomplice. Being his support. Associates to the crime, turned into method and means.

Tony wasn’t building weapons, but he was still _making_ them. He was making weapons out of the people around him.

God, what has he _done_?

 

“You’ve killed.”

Well, if that wasn’t a conversation-killer, he didn’t know what was.

Steve stilled. “Yes.” He stared down at his hands, and Tony knew he was imagining the bright red of his gloves.

You didn’t go through a war without blood on your hands, _Captain America_ be damned.

“How do you…” Tony swallowed. “How do you live with the memory?”

Steve’s eyes turned haunted; he rubbed his hands together (out, out damned spot). “I…try not to think about it. I try to forget. After a while, the nightmares don’t come as often.”

“I thought you never forget,” Tony pointed out. “Serum.”

Steve’s mouth twisted into a bitter, ruined smile, not at all surprised at being caught in the lie. “No, I don’t. But Pepper does. You do.” He looked up at Tony, his eyes a flat, hollow blue. “That’s who you’re asking for, isn’t it?”

 

“The Red Room’s method is to treat life as if it was already dead,” Natasha told him, voice flat. “From human, to animal, then from animal to inanimate. No point in grieving for a thing long dead.”

Her smile is small and bitter. “I do not advise it.”

 

He tried Thor. Thor was a prince of a warrior… _tribe_ would be insulting, but you get the drift. Warrior culture, maybe. He would understand.

Thor looked at him oddly. He paused for a considerable moment before replying. “I…have never been to war.”

“Excuse me?”

“I have battled. And I do enjoy combat,” Thor clarified, and his eyes took on a faraway look. “The culmination of training and skill and discipline, focused on the point of a blade or coalesced into lightning in your hands…yes. That, I enjoy. But…not to the death. Not over blood. To defeat, but not humiliate. There is a purity, a rush of combat.”

“You…like sparring,” Tony guessed.

“Yes, I suppose humans call it that. But…not _war_. War is…not about yourself. It is about politics, it is about the _people_. It is about freedoms and lives and bloodshed of the masses. You cannot stop war until it is won, and you cannot win until you’ve killed—whether by decimating or forcing a surrender, blood runs in rivers at the end. You lose your honour, your ideals, your very _self_ in wars. Wars are not won with clean hands.”

For a man who’d never been to war, Thor seemed to understand a lot about it.

Thor smiled at him, and the usual sunshine wattage of his smile was dim. “Once, I nearly started a war. But I have never been in one, and I hope I never will.”

 

“Yeah, sure, SHIELD’s got protocols for it. Post-traumatic stress disorder, an entire team of psychiatrists and shrinks, everything you can think of, everything modern psychology tells us we need.” Clint fired down the impossibly long range, the Beretta he was shooting at odds with the rest of him. Tony has never seen Clint practice with a gun, although it must be standard for SHIELD agents.

“Do they work?” Tony asked. He’d never been to therapy, and he expected most of them hadn’t either. It’d be the odd therapist who’d know how to treat traumas like an alien invasion or 70 years under the ice.

Clint gave him a long look. “What do you think?” A self-deprecating grin, baring teeth. “I look sane enough to you?”

Tony elected not to answer that.

Clint evidently didn’t expect an answer, instead turning back to the range.

“I won’t lie, it helps,” Clint admitted between shots, voice calm and carefully steady. “Psychology’s come a long damn way since Cap’s days, for example. But we select for those who’d survive to begin with. Those who work for the bigger picture, even if they make us sleep a little less soundly at night. The mission before the man is what keeps us ticking, Stark; it’s the quest before the conquered no matter what.

“But that’s not your way. That’s not Cap’s way, either. Which is why I’m a damn sight more comfortable following Cap in the field than I am SHIELD some days, even if I don’t think he’d ever make the judgement calls that sometimes I think he should make.”

Clint smiled a rictus smile, and Tony thought he saw the flare of Tesseract blue in Clint’s eyes. “Does that help Pepper, do you think?”

 

Bruce was a calm, stabilizing presence for a man who could break cities when he got angry. Pepper spent a lot of time with him nowadays. They didn’t speak much, just sat shoulder-to-shoulder. Sometimes they watched TV with the sound muted. JARVIS carefully edited out any mention of Killian from anything they watched, the same way he edited out anything with Obadiah years ago.

Sometimes Rhodey came too, with the stoic blankness Tony saw on Steve and Natasha’s and Clint’s faces. Trained soldiers, trained agents who had a job to do.

Pepper’s done a lot outside of her job description over the years, but killing for him has never been her job. Shouldn’t ever be her job.

“Pep,” Tony tried helplessly, because if he couldn’t help himself, he damn well couldn’t help her either. Because it didn’t matter if Killian was a bad person, if he’d been born a bad person or just turned into one. (That distinction hadn’t made a damn difference either when it came to Obie.)

Pepper looked up from her two laptops and another Starkpad, because she was just as much a hot mess as he was but she still has a job to do.

Pepper looked up at him, sandwiched between Rhodey and Bruce, surrounded by people who knew what it was like to kill for love. Sometimes, between reading stock reports and taking PR calls for damage control, he saw Pepper twitch her hand and stare at it, as if she still expected to melt metal with her touch.

But the fire didn’t come from her hands; it came from her eyes. Pepper stared at him with all the fire of Extremis blazing in her eyes, and Tony suddenly felt like incinerating on the spot.

“This is not about you,” she said, voice wavering from tears and drink, and Tony didn’t understand, because how could it not? She would mend his clockwork heart while terrified to death, she would chase a rogue mecha when her only weapon was her spiked heels, she would charge down an exploding race track screaming at him while she got him his suit.

And she would kill for him. Might even do it again, if push came to shove. How could it not be about him, when the two people Pepper has ever killed were all to protect him?

Rhodey reached over to hold her hand. Pepper laughed, a quivering sound, and Rhodey did not erupt into flames.

On her other side, Bruce gently pried her drink from her hands and set it down on the table. Vodka martini turned to vodka from the bottle. The drink was still warm.

“Oh, Tony.” Pepper tried to smile, but it was a brittle, jagged thing, the red of her perfect lipstick bleeding into the edges. “What’s one more?”

 

The next time Tony killed, he purposely did not do it with his repulsors. He landed beside the monster/person/evil and—despite the yelling—squeezed out its (his) lifeblood with his own hand, watching the sustenance pour onto his gauntlet.

If he made others into weapons, he deserved no less.

**Author's Note:**

> Thor is presumably around a thousand years old by the time Thor 1 rolled around, and yet he still didn’t grasp that starting a war with the Frost Giants recklessly was not a good thing. I took that as to mean despite his years of living, he’d never actually been to war, likely through Odin’s attempts at peacekeeping through the realms.


End file.
